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Early Age of Discovery
The Early Age of Discovery lasted from about 1453 AD until 1517 AD. It began with the era of Portuguese exploration sponsored by Henry the Navigator that began the Age of Discovery. It then ended on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 AD, when Martin Luthar published his Ninety-five Theses. By 1517, most of the basic characteristics of modern Europe were falling into place. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the completion of the Reconquista, modern Spain could be said to have emerged. As had the core of Russia, with decline of two-centuries of Mongol dominance under Ivan the Great. England emerged from the turmoil of the War of the Roses, with a powerful new dynasty, the Tudors. Meanwhile, explorations by the Portuguese and Spanish began the Age of Discovery, leading to the sea passage round Africa to the East, to European sightings of the Americas, and to Magellan's magnificent circumnavigation of the globe. The artistic flower of the Renaissance burst into full bloom with the unparalleled talents of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The arrival of the printing press introduced the era of mass communication, which would permanent altered the structure of society. History Europe in the late 1400s Dynastic Union of Spain A wedding in 1469 would prove of profound significance in the history of Spain; Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile (1474-1516 AD). The pious Isabel and the Machiavellian Fernando became an unbeatable team, ruling jointly over the whole Iberian Peninsula, except for Portugal and the remnants of Muslim Spain in Granada. With the combined strength of Aragon and Castile, Muslim power in Spain was at last brought to an end. Isabel and Fernando launched the final crusade of the Reconquista in 1482. At the time, the rulers of Granada were riven by internal feuds, and the Christians took full advantage of the situation. The Muslim last stand in the city of Granada was concluded after an eight-month siege in January 1492. The remaining Muslims were promised respect for their religion, culture and property, but this didn’t last long. Spain would become the most religiously intolerant country in Europe. In 1492, all Spanish Jews were forced to convert to Catholic Christianity or be expelled from Spain; some 160,000 of them left the country, mostly for tolerant Muslim North Africa. Ten years later, the same demands was made of the Spanish Muslims and most did; they had little option afterall, since the policy of the Christian authorities was generally to block such emigration. Such persecution was not unusual in Europe; Jews were expelled from England in 1278 and from France in 1182 and 1392. However, in Spain persecution reached an unusual intensity. In 1478 AD, the Pope allowed Ferdinand and Isabella to establish a branch of the Inquisition in Spain; an institution that dates back to the persecution of the heretic Cathar sect and the Albigensian Crusade of the early 12th-century. The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was tasked with rooting out the supposedly insidious menace of Morisco, Muslims and Jews only masquerading as Christians. The Inquisition, which had branches in Latin America also, became legendary for its dedication to its task, responsible for perhaps 12,000 deaths over its history, and widespread confiscation of property. By the end of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, modern Spain could be said to have emerged, and the balance of power within Europe had been drastically altered. Not only had new territory and wealth been found overseas, but in 1494 Ferdinand arranged for his daughter Joanna to marry into the powerful Habsburg dynasty. His grandson Charles V would be King of Spain and also the Holy Roman Emperor of imperial Germany. Age of Discovery Until the end of the Middle Ages, the most westerly region known to Europeans was the Canary Islands, but a huge revolution lay just ahead; the Age of Discovery (1419-1779). One explanation of it was some crucial shipbuilding and navigational developments that had taken place, spurred by more complex maritime trade: the stern-post rudder was adopted around 1300; in a gradual process three masts became the standard, and rigging improved to sail much closer to the wind; and in 1270 there appears the first reference to a chart, by which time the compass was in common use. The 14th century also saw the birth of modern geography, as princes subsidised research spurred by a desire for commercial prizes or missionary zeal. The most famous was the Majorcan Cartographic School where a collection of predominantly Jewish scholars flourished, until they were expelled in 1492. Another common explanation for the birth of the Age of Discovery is that when the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in 1453, it blocked Europe's access to the Silk Road, and the luxuries she had become accustomed to since the Crusading Age. The Ottomans monopolised Eastern trade, rather that cut it off, especially after the conquering exploits of Suleiman the Magnificent. They were largely content to let the Venetians control the trade and carrying of goods, while they just focused on making money from collecting taxes. Another impact on trade was the collapse of the Mongol Empire which made the Silk Road much more dangerous for merchants. Christianity and missionary zeal also play an important role, and there are obvious parallels between the Crusades and the Age of Discovery. Just as the Crusaders slaughtered Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099 with clear consciences because their opponents were infidels, so the Europeans would use their mastery of the globe to conquer, enslave, exploit, and dominate economically, all to bring Christian enlightenment to the pagans. Yet the Age of Discovery owes as much to Portugal's unique geopolitical setting. The Portuguese had a long Atlantic coast. They were land-locked from European trade by Spain, and increasingly barred from the Mediterranean by the Italian city-states. Almost inevitably, it seems, they were bound to push out into the Atlantic. Meanwhile with the Muslims still clinging on in Granada until 1492, Crusading zeal was more alive in the Iberian Peninsula than anywhere else in Europe. Portuguese sailors were first motivated to investigate the coast of Africa, not to find a route to the Orient, but in order to divert the lucrative trans-Saharan trade in gold and ivory away from Muslim Morocco. The great age of maritime exploration began in 1491 when Prince Henry the Navigator (d. 1460), the son of the king of Portugal, began to sponsoring sailors, mapmakers, astronomers, shipbuilders and instrument makers. Portuguese explorers discovered and began to settle the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427, mainly for sugar cane and vineyard cultivation. The productivity of the islands soon came to depend on another aspect of Portugal's new seafaring activities; the African slave trade. Slavery had gradually disappeared in Western Europe by 1100 through the opposition the Church, although it remained in the Muslim lands. However, a new and disastrous chapter in the story of slavery began in about 1444 with the import of Africans, initially to exchange for prisoners in Muslim Spain. Many motives lay behind Prince Henry's naval expeditions: a quest for Africa's gold and ivory; pure voyages of discovery; and the desire to spread Christianity and frustrate Islam. But the overriding purpose gradually became to discover a sea route round Africa to the East, with its rich promise of valuable trade in spices. Over the coming decades, Portuguese sailors were pushing farther south along the African coast, but the sheer difficulty of this task is well suggested by the fact that Prince Henry sent-out fourteen expeditions, and had explored as far as Sierra Leone by his death; less than a third of the way to the Cape of Good Hope. The two most significant Portuguese voyages took place a generation after the death of Henry the Navigator. In 1488, the sixteen months voyage of Bartolomeu Dias (d. 1500) took him round the Cape of Good Hope and a little further until the northeast trend of the coastline became unmistakable; thus proving that there was a sea route round the southern tip of Africa. Dias probably would have reached India had his crew not mutinied and forced him to return to Portugal. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama (d. 1524) would go further. Leaving Lisbon in July 1497, and his little fleet rounds the Cape of Good Hope in late November. Soon they were further up the east coast of Africa than Dias ventured, reaching Mozambique by March 1498 where they were excited to find Arab vessels in the harbour. From here it was relatively easy to find a pilot who knew the route northeast to India. The nature of the prevailing winds on the well-established India Ocean Trade network meant that captains frequently sailed six months eastwards and six months west. Da Gama reached the important trading centre of Calicut in south-western India in May 1498, where he was welcomed by the local Hindu ruler, who must surely have wondered why his guest was so keen to erect a stone pillar, claiming the territory for the Portuguese king. After three months in Calicut, he set sail for home, ignoring the local knowledge of the prevailing winds. By the time he reach the African coast almost half his crew had died of scurvy; a first glimpse of one of the problems of ocean travel. De Gama arrived back in Lisbon in September 1499, more than two years after his departure. He had proved that trade with the East by sea was possible. The early explorers had left Portugal with trading posts down the west coast and up the east coast of Africa, including Mozambique and Zanzibar. The Portuguese moved quickly to break Muslim supremacy in the Indian Ocean trade, and secure route eastwards to the Spice Islands of Indonesia: Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf was captured and fortified in 1514; Goa on the west coast of India in 1510; and Malacca, guarding the narrowest channel of the route east, in 1511. Portugal would dominate the long sea route round Africa to India and the Spice Islands until the early 17th century. Meanwhile in 1492, at a royal encampment in Santa Fe, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella debated whether to accept a proposal put to them by a visionary Genoese explorer, Christopher Columbus (d. 1506). For eight years, Columbus had been pestering European courts to sponsor him in an undertaking which obsessed him. The Portuguese explorers had had notable success in their attempts to sail east round Africa towards India and the Spice Islands, but Columbus had become convinced that he could achieve the same more easily by sailing west. It had long been the accepted view, deriving from Ptolemy, that nothing but sea separated Europe from India and China to the west. Nearly all educated Westerners understood, at least since the time of Aristotle (d. 322 BC), that the Earth is spherical; transmitted from the works of Ptolemy (d. 170). Eratosthenes (d. 194 BC) had correctly calculated the circumference of the Earth, but the old-fashioned units of distance used had led to much debate in the 15th century. Columbus believed that the unseen distance between Europe and China by sea was a mere 2300 miles, rather than the actual figure of 12,500 miles. Despite considerable skepticism, the Spanish monarchs finally accepted and Columbus moved fast to prepare vessels for the great adventure. On 3 August 1492, a little fleet of three vessels set sail from Spain; the Santa Maria, Pinta and Niña. After a brief stop-off in the Canaries, they sailed west into the unknown. During the five-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean there were several sightings of coast that turned out to be illusions, until at last on 12 October, a look-out spied real land; an island in the Bahamas that they named San Salvador. They were not the first Europeans to reach the Americas, the Vikings are credited with that, but they were the first to record their achievement. Columbus believed that he had reached the East Indies off the Asian coast, and therefore described the friendly native inhabitants as Indians; inaccuracies which have remained to this day for the aboriginal peoples of the whole American continent. By the same token this region became known to Europe as the West Indies. He spent almost three months visiting various islands in the region, including Cuba, until the Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked on Haiti. Columbus decided to leave here a small colony of some forty men, with food and ammunition for a year, while he sailed back to Spain with news of his achievement. Columbus reached Spain on 15 March 1493, where he was received with every honour, and presented the monarchs with a few captured natives and some gold treasure. This proved the high point of Columbus' career. Three more voyages to America lay ahead of him, but from now on misfortune increasingly blighted his endeavours, often deriving from his own inadequacy as a colonial administrator. Nevertheless, he had made the Atlantic crossing seem just an arduous journey, rather than a terrifying step into the unknown. In a few short years the New World had become linked to Europe in what was unmistakably a new era. The two enterprising Atlantic nations tried to come to understandings about their respective interests in a world of widening horizons. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) agreed to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal at a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde. Unbeknownst to either party at the time, it sliced through the entire eastern part of South America; Brazil was accidentally discovered by a Portuguese sailor six years later. By 1505, an Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci (d. 1512) in the service of the Portuguese king had explored far enough along the coastline while searching from a route round the landmass to come to a new conclusion; that this immensely long coastline was a separate continent of its own. Vespucci’s theory was popularised throughout Europe by a book of geography brought out by scholars in Lorraine in 1507; it suggested a name for the new continent based on the Latin version of Vespucci's first name, America. The theory was essentially confirmed by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (d. 1519) who established the Spanish colony of Santa María la Antigua in Central America in 1510; the forth Spanish colony in the Americas after Hispaniola (1496), Puerto Rico (1508) and Jamaica (1509). The Indians in Central America spoke of another vast sea, not far away to the west. In 1513, Balboa with a force of 180 Spaniards trekked westwards for four weeks, and saw the Pacific Ocean spread out before him. The culmination of the early phased of the Age of Discovery concluded with magnificent achievement of Ferdinand Magellan '''(d. 1521). The Portuguese had moved fast to secure a virtual monopoly on the profitable trade in eastern spices via the sea route round Africa. The Spanish were determined to break the monopoly by reaching the East Indies by sailing westwards. Magellan learned his craft between 1505 and 1512 voyaging to and around the East in the service of his native Portugal, but by 1516 offered his services to Spain, Portugal's great rival on the oceans. In September 1519, Magellan sailed from Spain with a fleet of five ships, carrying 265 men. Reaching Rio de Janeiro in mid-December, he spent ten months searching for a channel through to the Pacific. It was not until October 1520 that he found the straits that now bear his name much further to the south. His fleet had by now been reduced to three ships; one had been wrecked and another deserted. After a nightmarish ninety-nine day crossing of the Pacific without replenishment of food or water, the explorers finally made landfall on Guam in March 1521. In April, Magellan was killed in a skirmish with natives on the island of Mactan in the Philippines. He had already achieved the hardest part of the undertaking, coaxing his often mutinous crews across a vast unknown expanse of ocean. However, the glory of leading the first complete circumnavigation of the globe fell to one of his officers, Juan Sebastian del Cano (d. 1526). Del Cano finally reached Spain in September 1522, with the only surviving ship of five, and seventeen of the original crew of 265. With this achievement, humans at last knew the extent of the planet on which we live. Yet the pacific and the Americas still had surprises in store; not least the vast wealth of the Aztec and Inca, as well as Australia. English War of the Roses The '''War of the Roses (1455-1487 AD), England's most intense dynastic struggle, takes its name from the badges worn by the followers of the two branches of the royal family, descended from Edward III (1327-77). The House of York, descended through intermarriage from Edward's second son, had long been known by the sign of the white rose. The ruling House of Lancaster, descended from his third son, adopted the red rose as a contrasting symbol during the war between the two sides. The questions of legitimacy, that had lain dormant in England since Henry IV usurper the throne in 1399, returned to the fore during the ineffectual reign of King Henry VI Lancaster (1421-1471 AD). Henry VI was a pious scholarly man who had succeeded to the throne as a child. His reign was dominated by his Lancastrian and Yorkist relatives, constantly jockeying to grasp after power. The losses of English territory in the Hundred Years’ War, and the taxes that had been needed to fight the war, had left the country disheartened and angry. The disaffection of the nobles gradually coalesced around Duke Richard of York (d. 1460), who had a strong claim to the English throne through his mother. The tension erupted in the summer of 1453 when Henry VI lapsed into the first of recurring bouts of mental instability; possible inherited from his maternal grandfather Charles VI of France. Duke Richard of York seized control of the regency, and the inevitable and disastrous outcome was civil war; Lancaster against York. The first battles of the wars came St. Albans (May 1455), and then again at Northampton (July 1460). On each occasion the king's army was defeated, and, after Northampton, Henry VI himself was captured by the Yorkists. He was forced to acknowledge Duke Richard of York as his heir, even though he had a young son of his own. However, Queen Margaret and her son fled to Scotland, where she gained support for the Lancastrian cause. The Battle of Wakefield (December 1460) was a complete Lancastrian victory. Duke Richard of York was killed at Wakefield, but his eldest son, Edward, gathered the Yorkist forces and, while the Lancastrian were enroute to London, he won a crushing victory at the Battle of Towton (1461); probably the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. In the aftermath, he had himself proclaimed king as King Edward IV. The first phase of the civil war was over, except for the reduction of a few pockets of Lancastrian resistance. Turmoil continued during the reign of Edward IV York (1461-83). A quarrel within the Yorkist faction even saw Henry VI back on the throne in 1470 for six months, but Edward IV returned to England and defeated his rivals. Afterwards, Henry was again captured and died in the Tower of London. Now the whole male line of the House of Lancaster was essentially extinct, and Edward IV was secure on his throne until his death in 1483. He was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son, Edward V York (April-June 1483). The young king's regent was the uncle, Richard of Gloucester, who soon confined the king and his younger brother in the Tower of London; renowned as the Princes in the Tower, and widely assumed to have been murdered on their uncle's command. After arranging for parliament to declare all the children of Edward IV illegitimate, Richard had himself proclaimed King Richard III York (1483-1485). Richard III has become known as a ruthless Machiavellian villain with a freakish humpback who callously murdered his way to power, as famously portrayed in William Shakespeare's play. We will probably never know why he seized the throne. Was Richard motivated by poisonous personal ambition? A plot had recently been uncovered by the princes' mother to wrestle the regency from him, was he motivated by self-defence? There some patchy evidence that the princes actually were illegitimate, was he doing what he honestly considered his duty? Certainly Richard was well-respected before ascending to the throne, and according to contemporary reports his body deformity almost unnoticeable. Whatever the truth, Richard's position on the throne was precarious, and he increasing surrounded himself with his loyalest supporters, with the result that there was in no shortage of disaffected nobles ready to believe he was a usurper. And if they didn’t, Lancastrian propaganda would soon turn them against the king, and behind the last hope of the House of Lancaster, Henry Tudor; his connection with the royal family through the widow of Henry V was extremely tenuous. With a force of just 2,000 soldiers, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven in Wales in early August 1485. Three weeks later when he came to do battle at Bosworth, his force had grown to just 5,000 men; Richard III had about 8,000. However at the Battle of Bosworth Field (August 1485), one of Richard's commanders was killed in the initial skirmish, and the other deserted him. So Richard gambled everything on a courageous charge across the battlefield, but lost his helmet during the melee and was killed. The remains of Richard were finally found in 2012 under a city council car park in Leicester, thanks to the efforts of the Richard III Society, who assert that his longstanding negative portrayal is false Tudor politically motivated accusations. The skeleton had eleven wounds, eight of them to the skull. At Bosworth, Henry Tudor was the last king to win the English crown on the field of battle, and this effectively marked the end of the War of the Roses. In securing his seizure of the throne, Henry VII Tudor (1485-1509) proved himself a master in statecraft. Richard III was the subject of a vast Tudor propaganda campaign to paint him as a villain who cheerfully committed numerous murders in order to claw his way to power. To deal with the question of legitimacy, Henry married the daughter of Edward IV York; also finally uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. However, Richard III had arranged for all the children of Edward IV to be declared illegitimate, including Henry’s new wife. All documents related to her illegitimacy were destroyed so efficiently that to this day only one copy of the act of parliament has ever been found. Yet as undoubtedly a usurper, Henry’s reign was plagued by attempts to unseat him. They were often headed by pretenders, nonentities who were coached by the rebels to impersonate princes who would have a real claim to the throne; all failed. Meanwhile, caution and common-sense were typical of Henry’s reign, both in domestic and foreign affairs. Henry faced a treasury that was nearly bankrupt. To rebuild the royal finances, he needed peace and trade: he made important treaties with France and the Netherlands, securing England's textile exports; arranged the marriage of his daughter to the king of Scotland in order to secure peace between the two countries; and the marriage of his son to Catherine of Aragon, recognising the newly united Spanish kingdom as a new power to be reckoned with. Henry also strictly controlled expenditure and ruthlessly enforced royal taxes. One of his few extravagance was commissioning Venetian explorer John Cabot to cross the Atlantic in 1497, the first step towards English colonial expansion, though nothing came of these early voyages. Henry's reign began the gradual transformation of England towards the centralised Tudor state; helped somewhat by the fact that many of the great nobles died in the War of the Roses. By his death in 1509, Henry VII had restored stability to the English monarchy after the civil war, and a solvent government. His son, Henry VIII, succeeded to the throne without any trace of unrest. Rise of the House of Habsburgs Few medieval families played the game of feudal dynastic marriages better than the House of Habsburg. The family can be traced back to the 10th century and derive their name from their original home of Habichtsburg or "Hawk's Castle", on the Aar River in imperial Germany; what is now Switzerland. The elections of Rudolf I Habsburg (1273-91) as Holy Roman Emperor was a slightly surprising choice, but his modest realm was well positioned to deal with a major encroachment on German territory. A Slav dynasty had risen to power in the duchy of Austria, and under Ottokar II Přemyslid (d. 1278) was vigorously extending its territory. Ottokar had been a candidate for emperor also, and bitterness prompted him to refuse a summons to appear before an imperial diet. Rudolf used this as pretext to raise an imperial army and invade Austria. At the Battle on the Marchfeld (August 1278), Ottokar was defeated and killed. By these means, the Austria passed to the House of Habsburg, the heart of what would become the mighty Habsburg empire, assembled almost entirely through peaceful means. A series of Habsburg marriages between 1477 and 1515 gave rise to a much quoted phrase, "Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry". The marriages began under Frederick III of Austria (1440-1493), elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1440. From 1473, secret negotiations were undertaken between the emperor, and Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. The proposed bargain was that Charles's daughter would marry Frederick's son Maximilian, and in return the emperor would raise Burgundy from a duchy to a kingdom, thus securing her nominal independence from the French king. Unfortunately, the marriage occurred too late to prevent France essentially annexing Burgundy, but the offspring of this marriage, Philip I, was the bridegroom in the next advantageous alliance. Emperor Maximilian I (1493-1519) arranged for him to marry Joan, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the powerful monarchs of a newly united Spain. The emperor was merely interested in an alliance against France, rather than to place a Habsburg on the throne of Spain; Joan was then fourth in line. Nevertheless, he lived to see that as the astonishing outcome of the wedding. Three unexpected deaths meant that by 1500, Joan was the heiress to the Spanish throne. In that same year, she gave birth to a son, Charles. Maximilian’s skill as a matchmaker continued. In 1515, he betrothed his younger grandson, Charles's brother Ferdinand, to the daughter of the king of Bohemia and Hungary. When that male line dies out in 1526, these two kingdoms would also fall into Habsburg hands. Charles inherits his Spanish dominions when Ferdinand, his maternal grandfather in Spain, died in 1516. Maximilian, the young man's paternal grandfather in Austria, died in 1519. Thus, Charles V (1516-56) came to rule an empire that bestrode a very large slice of Europe, as Holy Roman Empire. By this time, the prestige of the family was such that the imperial crown became a Habsburg inheritance, in succeeding generations all the way down to its dissolution by Napoleon Bonaparte. France and the Italian Wars In the aftermath of the Hundred Years’ War, the French monarchy quickly recovered much of the authority it had lost during the early stages of war, through deftly exploiting a widespread distaste for the destructive self-interest of nobles, and an embryonic sense of French nationalism. Before the war, taxes in France had been occasional, but in the aftermath they were accepted as regular and permanent, and at the decree of the king's council. This improvement in royal revenue meant that the French parliament (Estates General) met less frequently and thus gradually lost its power. France was on the journey towards the autocratic absolutist monarchy that would characterise later centuries. The kingdom’s trade and commerce had much improved by the time Charles VIII (1483-98), grandson of Charles VII, ascended to the throne. He inherited a strong and prosperous France, but would drain its resources away to no good purpose in a series of disastrous Italian campaigns. By the 15th century, the Italian city-states existed in a fragile balance between the five great powers; Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States and Naples. None could defeat all the others, and they all prospered, helping to give rise to the extraordinary achievements of the Renaissance. Yet the rivalry between the cities invited disaster on them all, even as the Age of Discovery was causing a decline in the Mediterranean trade they thrived on. The duke of Milan urge king Charles VIII of France to invade Italy in 1494, to press his strong claim to the throne of Naples through his wife. The young French king, who had romantic dreams of glory, needed little encouragement; the Italian Wars (1494–1559). For the next six decades, Italy was the scene of almost ceaseless and inconclusive warfare, between local contenders especially Venice and the papacy, and foreign claimants from France, Spain, and imperial Germany, as well as opportunistic plunderers like the Ottoman Turks. The wars were characterised by shifting alliances and counter-alliances that wreaked widespread devastation on the country: the hinterland of Venice was plundered in 1499 and 1509; Rome was sacked and looted in 1527; and the ten-month-long siege of Florence in 1529 brought ruin to its suburbs. The sophisticated trade and industry of Italy virtually collapsed. The eventual result of all this mayhem was the Treaty of Cambrai (1529) and the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). In them, France renounced all her claims in Italy, allowing the Habsburgs to gain hegemony over much of the country. All the Italian city-states lost their independence apart from Venice and Savoy. Tsarist Russia The two centuries during which the Mongol Golden Horde dominated the region, had a great impact of the Russian principalities. A new balance within Russia appeared, with Moscow and Novgorod the eclipsing the preeminence of Kiev. Both paid tribute to their conquerors, making their separate arrangements. Of the two, the Princes of Moscow seemed to collaborate most fully with their overlords, readily accepted the assignment as Mongol tax collector often by force from lesser Russian princes. As a result, they were able to limit Mongol interference in their own domains. This allowed the Princes of Moscow to build-up an unprecedented position of strength among the Russians, which was given extra validity in 1326 when the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church transfers his residence there. By the late 14th century, the Golden Horde was losing territory to another great Mongol conqueror in the style of Genghis Khan, Timur (d. 1405). Sensing an opportunity, the Prince of Moscow gathered a vast army from all the Russian principalities, and won a rare victory over a Mongol army at the Battle of Kulikovo (September 1380). This did little to end the Mongol dominance of the region, and indeed they retaliated just two years later by sacking Moscow. Yet it did establish Moscow incontrovertibly as the leading power among the Russians. The Princes of Moscow were now sometimes describing themselves as "of Moscow and all Russia". That became more than an empty boast during the reign of Ivan the Great (1462-1505 AD), who succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty-two. He was determined to liberate all the Russian lands from the Mongol yoke, and instead bring them under Moscow's dominance. His first took the field in 1470 against Moscow's biggest rival, the rich commercial Russian city of Novgorod. Finally in 1478, the long-standing independence of the city was brought to an abrupt end. With this important step, in 1480 the Grand Prince of Moscow refused to pay the annual tribute of tax to the Golden Horde for the first time in more than two-hundred years. The Mongol Khan prepared to march against Moscow, but the Horde was already in the process of disintegrating into several smaller khanates, and in the end withdrew without a fight. This important symbolic moment enabled Ivan the Great to present himself internationally as the free sovereign of an independent state. Meanwhile, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 presented another glittering opportunity, that Ivan and his descendants made much of. Many Byzantine scholars, artisans, and masons fled to their fellow Orthodox Christians of Moscow, and Ivan used them for a complete renovation of his Moscow fortress, to celebrate his successes. Next to the Kremlin, traders and artisans set up shop in Kitay Gorod, which became the cultural and commercial heart of Moscow. There also developed the concept of the Third Rome: Rome itself had fallen to the Western barbarians and Catholic heresy; and Constantinople was in the hands of Ottoman Turks. Thus the third, Moscow, became the centre of the Orthodox Christian world. The theory was reinforced by Ivan’s marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI. Under Ivan’s grandson, Ivan the Terrible, the Russians began to call their monarch Tsar; derived from Caesar. By the end of his reign, Ivan the Great had gathered all the Russian lands under Moscow’s control, from the White Sea in the north almost as far south as Kiev, and laid the foundations of the Russian nation. The dim embers of Russia’s later animosity with the West can ever be seen, in the longstanding hostility between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Throughout her history Russia would periodically embrace and learn from Europe (such as under Peter the Great), only to inevitably recoil from the West. High Renaissance The artistic flower of the early Renaissance, burst into full bloom during the High Renaissance (1490-1527). Artists no longer pondered the art of antiquity, they now had the confidence to go their own way, secure in the knowledge that what they were doing was as good, if not better, than anything that had been done before. Rome would be sacked in 1527 during the Italian Wars, marking the end of this extraordinary era. While there were many dozens of outstanding Renaissance artists, the period is inexorably linked with three masters of unparalleled talent: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael (Raffaello) Sanzio. Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452) epitomised the Renaissance ideal. He was trained as a painter in Florence, becoming a member of the painters' guild in 1472. Yet, painting was just one of his areas of interest. His famous notebooks show his feverish mind working on ideas for sculptures, architecture, engineering, science, music, mathematics, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, history, cartography, and especially inventions. Leonardo was ahead of his time in many of the notions he dreamed up: parachutes, helicopters, and tanks were useless until there was an engine to propel them. His paintings would in themselves rank him among the world's greatest artists, though few survived for Italy was consumed by war throughout his working life. Little remains of his two most ambitious projects, a large mural in Milan and another in Florence. In The Last Supper, Leonardo was a pioneer in his treatment of the human drama between Jesus and the apostles. The Mona Lisa introduced Leonardo's smoky style, a subtlety in the use of paint and the treatment of light, which added a new technique to the painter's repertoire. She smiles at the viewer, with her hands folded demurely in front of her, with a deliciously mysterious gaze. She has been in France since 1517, when Francis I made the elderly Leonardo his court painter. The precocious genius Michelangelo (d. 1475) sculpted two of his best-known works before the age of thirty: the Pietà (1499), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding on her lap the dead Christ that still remains one of the most beautiful works of art in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City; and a marble statue of David (1504), presenting the biblical hero about 13 feet high as a naked youth standing with petulant confidence. In 1505, the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome to provide a sculpted tomb for his own memorial. However, the project was doomed to remain unfinished, for the Pope had an even more challenging task for this multi-talented artist. In 1508 Michelangelo, despite holding a low opinion of painting, was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12). These vast panels along the centre of the ceiling tell the story of Genesis, from God's creation of the universe, to the spark of life, and on through the expulsion from Eden, to the human frailty in the drunkenness of Noah. The effect of the Sistine ceiling is exuberant and optimistic, reflecting its times. In contrast, Michelangelo’s altar wall depicting the Last Judgement, commissioned after the sack of Rome in 1527, is a dark and dramatic work. As well as a sculpture and painter, Michelangelo was frequently commissioned as an architect. His first major architectural project was a commemorative chapel for the Medici family in Florence designed from 1520. At the Laurentian Library, he pioneered the Mannerist style which dominated architectures in Italy until about 1580, when the Baroque style began to replace it. To add to his other distinctions, about 250 of Michelangelo’s poems survive, which subsequently won him a reputation among Italy's leading poets. While Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, just a few hundred yards away Raphael (b. 1483) was working on another commission from the pope. Something of a boy genius, news of Raphael's talent must have spread rapidly for him to be summoned to Rome and given a papal commission at the age of twenty-six. It occupied him for the rest of his life. The pope wanted frescoes for a series of rooms in the Vatican. In the Stanze, Raphael triumphed over the obstacles of vaulted rooms, with walls interrupted by doors or alcoves. The frescos involve large numbers of characters, requiring compositional skills similar to those of a director presenting a scene on a stage. The most well known are the School of Athens, featuring Plato, Aristotle and many others, and the Disputa in which biblical figures and saints discuss the Christian sacrament. Raphael died at thirty-seven and his career spanned just sixteen years, but in that time he designed tapestries to hang around the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel, became a formidable portrait artist, and spent five years as the architect of the new St Peter's. The six decades of almost ceaseless and inconclusive warfare in Italy, gradually sapped the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and the wealth of the patrons who supported its artist. By 1550, it had been replaced with a more somber less innovative outlook. Yet the changes wrought by the Italian Renaissance proved irreversible and spread to other parts of Europe. The outstanding figures of the later Renaissance outside Italy were the German Albrecht Dürer (b. 1471), and the Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch (b. 1450). Dürer's achievement was enhanced by his originality in many differing fields of art; engravings, altarpieces, portraits, watercolours, and books. Bosch's work was collected within his lifetime in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and was widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell. The Renaissance thus merged into a variety of loosely related cultural movements: the philosophical work of Erasmus (b. 1466) and Thomas More (b. 1478); the English playwrights William Shakespeare (b. 1564) and Christopher Marlowe (b. 1564); the emergence of ballet in the French court; and the Scientific Revolution. Printing Press (1455) The printing press is often cited as one of the greatest invention in the history of mankind. The early innovations in printing were the striking achievement of Buddhists in China and Korea. The world's earliest known woodblock printed document is a short religious texts printed on a single sheet of paper in Korea in about 750. The earliest known book, a 16 feet long scroll known as the Diamond Sutra, can be even more precisely dated to 868, for the details of the publication were given at the end of the text. The high quality of the printing suggests it must have had many predecessors. From the 11th-century, the Chinese were experimenting with manual movable type printing, but the Chinese script posed significant challenges, and it wasn’t until the early 13th-century that the Koreans finally achieved it; the oldest surviving printed book dates from 1377. Nevertheless, the crucial final step of the printing process was a European innovation; Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press. The life of Gutenburg (b. 1400) is obscure; what we know of him, we learn from the failure of his business career. Originally a goldsmith from the tiny German duchy of Mainz, Gutenburg seems to have begun experimenting with a printing press by the 1430s. In 1439, he was being sued by his business partners in Strasbourg. The transcript of the trial, which he lost, describes a press and a supply of metal type. By 1450, he was back in Mainz where he borrowed 1600 guilders from a businessman, Johann Fust, with his printing equipment as security. By the time the first Gutenburg Bible was published in 1456, Gutenburg had again been sued, and the business had been taken over by Fust. Nevertheless, Gutenberg's achievements were eventually recognised in 1465, when the archbishop of Mainz granted him a title and an annual stipend. The printing process involves complex problems at every stage: arranging the individual letters, aligned and well spaced, in a form which will hold them firm and level to transfer the ink evenly to the paper, though applying a rapid but steady downward pressure. Gutenburg's new technology, so brilliantly launched, spreads rapidly: there were printing presses in the Papal State by 1464; Switzerland by 1465; Venice and Paris by 1470; Spain and Belgium by 1474; London in 1476; in Sweden by 1483; and as far away as Spanish Mexico City by 1539. The printing press allowed for the mass production of inexpensive printed books; by 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced some twenty million books. It played a key role in the rapid dissemination of knowledge that led to the Scientific Revolution, a rise in literacy, the spread of learning to the masses, and the modern knowledge-based economy. The revolutionary potential of printing would soon be felt in the Protestant Reformation. Although China and Korea achieved all the early innovations in printing, they were denied these benefits, only acquiring the printing press in 1833 imported from Europe. Category:Historical Periods